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Saturday, January 17, 2015

Interactive Friction: Far Cry 3: Episode 3: Jason in Wonderland

We continue our playthrough of Far Cry 3 by sneaking onto a ship wreak after tripping our on drugs.

This is one the first drug-induced hallucinations that we will experience in Far Cry 3. It also happens to be one of the most pointless hallucinations in the game. Very few things of note actually happen during the scene. My gut feeling says that they only had it to introduce the concept of psychedelic mushrooms on Rook Island before we got into the more intense trips later in the game. Even still, I think just having a drug dealer on the island is introduction enough without Alice in Wonderland nonsense.

We also get the scene where Jason's dead brother Grant shows up in his vision, telling him that he's good with a gun. If done with a bit more of a subtle hand, then it could have been a very interesting start down Jason's path to madness. As it stands, like with the beginning of the game, it is done with such a heavy hand that it feels like the writers are insulting my intelligence.

Later on, these hallucinations will be a bit more important to the story, but they also their own problems as well, which we will see later in the Let's Play. For now though, while that mission only took 5 minutes, it really does not seem to serve a large purpose beyond introducing drugs.

It is also interesting how quickly this game goes by when we are only worrying about the main story, and almost completely ignoring the side content. Games developed by Ubisoft tend be like that, I've noticed. Most of the game's reported length comes, for better or worse, from all of the side content that liters the game world. In our own playthroughs, Sam and I didn't get to the stealth mission in the boat until about 5 hours into the game. Considering that we are barely over an hour into the playthrough, that means most of my time was spent capturing towers and outposts, because I did none of the other side stuff until I needed the mission-exclusive hides for crafting.